TV programs worth watching
Sun February 22 — Sat February 28

The Australian artist Bill Henson uses a camera and a darkroom 
but they are clearly his canvass and brush. But as The Art Of 
Bill Henson (ABC 3.30pm Sunday) shows, his extraordinary 
photographic studies are the product of an alienated personality 
that emphasises images of sadness and loss.

He shuns people as subjects outside his studio and prefers to 
roam his home town at 3.00am to take his dark and moody photos of 
empty, deserted locations.

The three-part series Lost Worlds: Who Wrote the New 
Testament? (SBS 8.30pm Sundays) won't please Christian 
fundamentalists, revealing as it does just how confused and 
contradictory the "word of God" really is.

Did you know there were originally over 50 Gospels including one 
written by Mary Magdalene? If you are interested in the actual 
history of early Christianity then this is an interesting and 
informative series.

The poet Byron was an aristocrat who lived in a time of ideas and 
high ideals, the aftermath of the French revolution. He flouted 
convention (almost certainly fathering a child by his own half 
sister), wrote prolifically and befriended the revolutionary poet 
Shelley.

Eventually shunned by polite society, he lived abroad and threw 
himself into the revolutionary movements in Italy and Greece, in 
pursuit of the latter of which he died in 1824, at the age of 
only 36.

Although he had affairs with various women, it was ideas, both 
literary and political, that mattered to him most. The new two-
part series Byron (ABC 8.30pm Sundays) however, is 
predicatbly concerned with his "life and loves".

Byron is portrayed as a combination of smouldering passion, 
hedonistic abandon and defiance of the fates. What more could you 
want in a drama about a great writer who was also a 
revolutionary?

Cutting Edge: Power Trip (SBS 8.30pm Tuesday) is about the 
privatisation of electricity in the former Soviet republic of 
Georgia. Thanks to Gorbachev and Shevardnaze, the people of 
Georgia must now pay for electricity — to a giant US 
transnational, AES.

When AES starts cutting off people's electricity for unpaid 
bills, the Georgians take to the streets. Interesting viewing of 
capitalism in action against the people.

Written and directed by Andy Hamilton (who did Drop the Dead 
Donkey), Bedtime (ABC 10.00pm Tuesdays) is an 
intriguing six-part drama series set in the bedrooms of adjoining 
houses, in an ordinary street in an ordinary London suburb.

Written, and to some extent played, like a television play, 
Bedtime is a mix of characters, relationships, attitudes 
and situations. It is made eminently watchable by the quality of 
the cast.

These include Stephen Tompkinson, Timothy West and the wonderful 
Sheila Hancock, who has been too long away from our screens. As 
she demonstrates here, she can create comedy in the unlikeliest 
places with simply a raised eyebrow or a resigned sigh.

The nine-part documentary series Impact: Songs That Changed 
The World (SBS 7.30pm Wednesdays) is not concerned with 
revolutionary songs. You will not find The Marseillaise or 
The International here.

By "change the world", the producers mean "influenced pop 
culture". So the first program is about Chuck Berry's pioneering 
rock 'n' roll number Maybellene. Ho hum.

There's an awful lot of anger, despair and fear out there in 
bourgeois society today. A very articulate New York cop I saw 
interviewed on this subject some years ago described the police 
in that city as "an army of occupation" trying to keep the lid on 
the people's developing anger.

For Communists, the anger, fear and despair are clearly products 
of an inherently unjust, unfair and failing system. For its part, 
the ruling class tries to take people's minds off the subject 
altogether.

They offer distractions — sport and gossip — and manipulate the 
people's emotional life so that happiness becomes defined by 
whether you acquire new possessions. People are encouraged to 
watch television and laugh at life's vicissitudes, or seek escape 
in fantasy worlds or chemical-induced dreamscapes.

But if that does not work, and it will not work forever, then it 
is equally important that the ruling class find something else to 
blame. And that something else appears to be our genes.

As the three-part series Primal Instincts, on The Big 
Picture (ABC 8.30pm Wednesdays) shows, Anger, Happiness and 
Fear are among "our most basic emotions", primitive forces that 
supposedly "drive road rage, addiction, compassion and 
uncontrollable phobias".

Made by the ABC with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and 
the Discovery Channel, the series "reveals how emotions rule our 
lives and how we struggle to control them".

It's Stalin-bashing time again, apparently. Despite the fact that 
the demands of the anti-Soviet "reformers" and dissidents to 
"open the archives" revealed that executions under Stalin ran to 
around 30,000 or so, the new three-part series Stalin: Three 
Faces Of Evil (SBS 8.30pm Thursdays) contentedly repeats the 
Cold War propaganda of "millions of executions".

Readers of The Guardian hardly need reminding that when 
the ruling class attacks Stalin they are not concerned about 
"opposing dictatorship" but about opposing and discrediting 
Communism. And especially, these days, are they concerned about 
rooting it out on the territory of Russia.

SBS' own notes on the program point this up: "While Germany is 
still far from completely coming to terms with its past, in 
Russia the process of confronting it has barely begun. A decade 
after the collapse of the Russian Empire the full truth about 
Stalin's terrifying and extraordinary world is finally emerging."

Note the use of the Cold War propaganda term "Russian Empire" for 
the USSR.

The practice of altering newsreel footage to suit the needs of 
the television producer grows apace. Now we have a whole series 
based on the extraordinary concept of colourised archival film.

The six-part series, which we are assured brings "sharp focus and 
vivid hues" to its subject, is The First World War In 
Colour, screening on As It Happened (SBS 7.30pm 
Saturdays).

When TV moguls sought new viewers for black & white movies they 
did not set about educating young people on the glories of black 
& white cinematography. No, they electronically coloured in the 
images so they resembled a colour film (but with inappropriate 
lighting).

Film directors and cinematographers protested at this vandalism 
of a great art form and eventually forced the moguls to drop the 
practice. But who will demonstrate to protect newsreel footage 
from the same "improvement"?

Manufacturing pretend colour newsreels of WW1 when in fact there 
were none does a disservice to history. Turning gritty authentic 
B&W footage into ersatz picturesque colour footage in the 
interests of boosting ratings is surely a travesty for a 
supposedly historical series.

As to that, WW1 was the ultimate example of inter-imperialist 
rivalry. For several years the rival groupings had been trying to 
find an opportunity for a war to redistribute markets, colonies 
and trade.

In this series however, Austria declares war on Serbia in revenge 
for the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand at Sarejevo, 
which brings Europe's "complex set of alliances" into play and in 
turn "triggers an unstoppable catastrophe". Yeah, sure.